Women & Children First by Gill Paul ~ Book Review

Reg Parsons is 21 years old and has secured a job on the Titanic as a first class steward.  He's worked on other ships before but with this position he's hoping to save enough to start a business of his own.  Juliette Mason-Parker is travelling in first class with her mother who is determined to find Juliette a rich husband and have her married off before her pregnancy becomes obvious and their reputations are ruined.  Annie McGowan's husband went to America 18 months ago to find a job and now her and their four children are aboard the Titanic in 3rd class excited to see Seamus once again and start a new life.  But when the Titanic sinks not only are their dreams in shatters now they must navigate the uncertainty, the PTSD and the guilt of having survived the horrific event.  Coming to terms with what they saw will not be easy, moving on even harder and each handles it in their own way.  Will they ever stop hearing the cries of those that died around them while they made it alive?

Titanic is a buzzword for me in stories and this one took a different perspective than those I've read before.  Most of the stories basically stopped when the rescue ship Carpathia arrives,  but this story mostly dealt with how these 3 survivors tried to carry on their lives as survivors while so many didn't make it.  The first part of the story lays the background of their lives and the reasons they were sailing on the ship and the second deals with how they tried to rebuild.  It was a very interesting perspective.  Most of the story is told through the perspective of Reg the first class steward but the main characters lives all intersect and  connect both on the ship and afterward.  The story was gripping and the description of the sinking, though I've read other Titanic stories, still kept me on the edge of my seat.  Character development was good and it was interesting to read, in spite of it being fictional, some of the decisions of the characters that were made post survival.  While it's easy to sit in judgment of them seeing it as horrible decisions from our viewpoint, it made me think of actual survivors and how they would have had to make split second decisions just having passed through the immense trauma that they did, arriving in a place they didn't know, with literally nothing, possibly filled with regrets at what they might have done or didn't do during the disaster.  The book also explored a bit of the spiritualism that was popular in America at the time of the sinking as some survivors desperately consulted mediums to try and connect with loved ones they had lost.  It doesn't dwell on it but neither does it shirk from that part of the Titanic survivors history.  I found the story drew me right into the lives of these characters. 

I rated it a 9.5/10